The night air was still,
Not calm — no, that was too kind a word.
It was held. Forcefully choked.
Fire crackled, futile, a mere whisper fighting against the relentless and chilly torrents
How fitting, poetic even.
Along the ridgeline, the tents of the 9th Mars Cohort stood like stitched wounds in the frost. Thin canvas, prayer-stitched. Barely enough to keep out the cold, let alone the fear.
Soldier Eiran Voss sat beneath a dead tree, eyes raised not to the hidden stars,
smothered by the creeping ash-cloud of the Viritarii's approach—but to memory.
He saw his mother again, that damn brute, whose thick skin he'd inherited, and thank The Flame Father he did, because he'll need every bit of it now.
He saw his girl, still at the forge, still yelling for him to be careful, doing her best to see him off with a strong demeanor, ignoring the kicking in her stomach.
He thought of the starry sky, where he would often gaze, reminding him of where they had come from. Earth, huh? There wasn't enough time to worry about the other colonies, but he still prayed to Flame-Father that they weren't subjected to the same terrors.
Dismissing the image of his beloved sky, it was now time to face reality.
Now, in its place: the shimmer of the distant flame wall, rising like dawn on the wrong side of the sky.
…
Boots thudded softly through the mud. Without as much as a sound made, just their mere presence drew the gazes of all.
Commander Estra Kael, a woman carved from stone and thunder, stood atop the embankment. Her armor was worn, layered with the dirt of five campaigns and the blood of too many, too recent.
She looked like death's envoy.
"You feel it, don't you? The burn in your chest. The tremble in your fingers. The ache of fear biting behind your teeth. That's good. It means you still believe, hope."
A murmur passed through the soldiers. Eiran clenched his fists.
"Out there," she pointed, not with a sword but a bare hand, wrapped in binding cloth and old scars, "they come. The Viritarii. The Mordreon's butchers. They parade their perverted god of strength, they believe that their vile visage, their abominable legionnaires, domineering Centurions, their… Praetorians and that godforsaken Emperor — they think we fear them."
Her voice rose—clear, cutting, and bitterly beautiful.
"It isn't true is it? We, children of Our Flame-Father Velgrith, we've tempered our minds, bodies, and souls in his image, we are not born of flame—we are forged in it. Was all of that effort made just for us to kneel at the first sight of a challenge?."
She paused. Her eyes scanned them like embers waiting to catch.
"NO! We have not kneeled yet, And we will not kneel now!
We have continued to fight, to claw, to bleed, to march!
I ask you this: if this is the last march—do not let it be one the gods remember with shame, let it be one drowned in Viritarri blood."
A cry rose—not a cheer, but a snarl, a cry of wrath wrapped in grief.
"Will you follow me?"
They roared. Eiran with them.
…
The horns blared low—like dying whales beneath the earth.
The banners lifted, streaked in soot and stitched in defiance.
Feet hit mud. Metal clanged. Orders whispered between ranks.
The army moved.
Through the forest of blackened bones.
Past the ruined altars of fallen shrines.
Toward the ember-glow horizon where the Viritarii gathered like a storm given form.
Eiran walked with his head low.
His hands shook. But they gripped the rifle still. He counted every breath. He tried to ignore the stench of oil and scorched blood that clung to the rising wind.
Eiran recalled the stories he had heard of Earth, where forests were lush green, nearly as dense as his old man.
He chuckled, drawing confused gazes from those around
Unlike those mysterious rainforests, these 'trees'—if they could even be called that—gargantuan spiral towers, sparsely distributed, with concave shaped trunks, lacking any sort of life on their dry sun-baked limbs. Despite how much humanity has terraformed the planet over the years, Mars still remained largely empty, made up of mostly flat, desert lands, with the occasional mountainous region.
Around him, soldiers whispered prayers.
"I pissed myself when the last one roared. Still got the bastard with a spear, though."
- - -
"She smiled at me. The commander. She smiled, AT ME, I'm sure of it. Uoah, I feel like I can take apart that damned emperor with my barehands!"
- - -
"It's my first time using a weapon blessed by an oracle of Velgrith, I can't believe the senate approved for the entire treasury to be emptied for this battle…"
Even in fear, they joked, wept, gossiped, and they continued to march.
Eiran glanced ahead. The horizon was catching flame. Not the sun.
The Emperor, "Crowned in ruin" or whatever the fuck he called himself —
Solmarth Vorrhael's army was near.
He gritted his teeth.
He imagined his lady's hand in his again.
And he marched.
To battle, into the burning godstorm.…